Marketing mix modeling solutions have been around for quite some time, providing marketers in several key categories with complex statistical models that aim to find the correlation between past marketing activities and business outcomes, like sales or market share.

However this space has recently seen significant changes, due to a few specific dynamics:

• The proliferation of digital and social media with increasing importance in the marketing mix.
• Marketers' increased demand for tools that are not only able to deliver insights on past campaigns but also able to give forward-looking recommendations on how to improve marketing return on investment (ROI) in the future.
• The rising role that sophisticated software plays in integrating the ever-growing number of data streams and in enabling complex analysis to be navigated and customized via powerful graphic user interfaces.

To help navigate this complex and highly relevant space for senior marketers, our research team has published the first Forrester Wave™ for vendors in the marketing mix modeling space. We screened more than 30 vendors, shortlisted six that we consider to be the key players in this very fragmented market, and ranked them according to more than 40 different criteria. The evaluation uncovered a market in which:

• MarketShare, Marketing Management Analytics, and ThinkVine lead the pack.
• SymphonyIRI is a Leader but lacks collaborative functionalitites.
• Marketing Analytics and Ninah are competitive Strong Performers.

The final result of the research process can be found in my new report, “The Forrester Wave™: Marketing Mix Modeling, Q3 2011.” This includes the detailed overview of the dynamics affecting this fragmented market and the full breakdown of the key vendors that will help senior marketers better understand whether marketing mix modeling could be a valid addition to their arsenal of analytics tools.